The main objective of this action is to create the necessary educational tools to support training and promotional activities on climate characterization for hydrological, water-related risks and hydro-power applications, targeted at different sectors and user levels. The educational tools and the training materials will use Copernicus databases and services for characterizing climate (meteorological records and climate model outputs) and watershed properties (land uses, vegetation distributions, etc.).

The action will contribute to the Climate and Energy, the Emergency Response and Crisis Management and the Urban and Regional Planning Copernicus strategies by empowering practitioners with a deeper understanding of the tools that Copernicus provides to transform data of the Earth System into information.

Several kinds of materials will be developed and training activities carried out.

Educational tools:

• Several materials -mainly manuals, software, notebooks and videos- in Spanish and English.
• Virtual course and MOOCs.

Training and promotional activities:

• At the academic level, training courses for lecturers will also be organized to transfer the developed materials and software to other collaborators in Europe.
• Tools will also serve to train engineering practitioners at private companies from the water industry and from public institutions.

The materials will focus on different areas. The most important one will be climate characterization, mostly including precipitation and temperature, and including regular and extreme regime characterization, climate change effects consideration and forecasting systems.

The target areas of these materials and training courses will be related with hydrological problems, such as water resources evaluation under current and future conditions (climate change), design of infrastructures (dams, reservoirs, bridges), evaluation of flooding and drought risks and cost-benefit analysis of climate change adaptation measures in hydropower stations, just to cite some of the specific applications that can be developed.

The materials developed in Spanish will serve to reach a wide range of students and practitioners well beyond the borders of Europe and to establish Copernicus as a default service for data collection in hydrological applications in Spanish-speaking countries.

IHCantabria will be in charge of developing the materials and to collect user needs from the identified potential partners and stakeholders. First of all, meetings and videoconferences will be held with the potential partners to identify their needs. The second step will be the creation of the materials: notes, manuals, software and pilot cases and exercises. The last step will be to organize workshops and meetings to disseminate the results and train the potential partners (and additional ones that may show interest in this action) in the tools developed during the action.

Output and Results:

• A series of materials – manuals, software, notebooks, videos – to create different stand-alone courses for using Copernicus services within the field of water engineering and water-related industries.
• Several workshops will be organized to disseminate the contents.
• Incorporate a working knowledge of the services and possibilities of Copernicus into the curriculum of current students of Civil and Environmental Engineering, fostering the incorporation of Copernicus within the standard set of tools that future engineers will consider in their everyday activity.